WordPress is the most widely used CMS in the world. As a developer, WordPress is the ideal way to share your knowledge with a large community as well as build a profitable business. Getting started with WordPress development has been a challenge for novice developers, compared to building everything from scratch in other frameworks. It's very easy to build WordPress sites by connecting bits and pieces without actually knowing what's happening under the hood. Many developers tend to follow this path and face maintenance and security nightmares in the long run. This book is structured to explain the components used in WordPress development, when and where to use them, and why you should be using each component in specific scenarios.
You will begin this book by learning the basic development setup and coding standards of WordPress. Mastering the built-in database is one of the keys to becoming a expert in WordPress development. In this section, you will learn about the database structure, and examine the data usage of the built-in features and their limitations in order to plan the data needs of your application. Then you will move onto an important topic: the theme and plugin development process. In this section, you will learn how themes and plugins fit into an application while understanding basic to advanced techniques for extending themes and plugins.
With the basics covered, we explore the use of the wide range of APIs provided by WordPress and see how we can leverage them to rapidly build solutions. Next, we move onto another essential section, where we explore the techniques for capturing, processing, and displaying user data while integrating third-party components into the site's design. Finally, you will learn how to test and deploy the application with secure and maintainable code, while providing the best performance for end users.
By the end of this book, you will have the ability to choose the right components for any development task and build flexible solutions that work with existing plugins and themes.
